Change the size of the chinese character pop-up in XP?

Life Technology
1

Hi,

I’ve got a small laptop running English XP Pro and am using the chinese keyboard option (under Control Panel/Regional & Language settings) to enter chinese characters (I use pinyin, but traditional characters).

My problem is that the pop-up box containing character suggestions (which have the same sound as the pinyin I entered) is very small on my screen (only 9"), so I can’t actually make out many of the characters listed.

Does anyone know if it’s possible to increase the size of font used in this pop-up?

If so, how?

Thanks for any suggestions!

Regards,
Ben

2

To my knowledge, there is no settings to specifically alter the pop-up size for all traditional Chinese pinyin IMEs that come with all current versions of Windows – other than the non-solution of lowering screen resolution, which is just wrong.

I was told that Chewing is free and considerate in this respect, and overall a very smart IME, but I have not tried it out personally.

Good luck!

3

My original post is now a bit old, but I thought I’d post an update in case anyone has a similar problem…

I tried a couple of other IMEs and have ended up using the Google Pinyin one for the the moment, which displays character suggestions in a fairly readable font, even on my small laptop.

The Google Pinyin IME is actually a very good IME.

Although it comes up in the language bar as PRC Chinese, you can set it to use traditional characters (sort of…see below).

A feature is that it doesn’t need entering of tones, as it makes “intelligent” guesses of what character you are writing based on your own past history of writing, as well as, I believe, on a central database of chinese texts held by Google. So if you use a particular character combination a lot, it will starting come up as the first offered option, which you just hit SPACE to accept. Most of the time it guesses right, but it’s relatively easy to fix when it guesses wrongly.

Although it has a setting for using traditional characters, there are some oddities, such as when you enter ‘shen me’, you get 什么，whereas when you enter ‘tai wan’ you get: 臺灣.

I have found using the Google IME has speeded up my pinyin typing immensely. A downside is that because you don’t need to enter the tone numbers, then you might find you start forgetting them… I found that having to type them in the Microsoft IME did help reinforce my memory for the tones, although it slows you down too.

I haven’t found a way to get the Google IME to accept tones… maybe this would be a handy addition for learners.

Anyway, the Google Pinyin IME is available at:
tools.google.com/pinyin/ (in chinese)

Also, some nice person has translated into English all the menus in the IME’s options (which are all in chinese), so this page may also be helpful for people wanting to try this out:
scattered-notes.blogspot.com/200 … input.html
(hover your mouse over the pictures of the menus and you get a tool-tip style popup of what each option means)

Hope this is of use.

Cheers,
Ben

4

Thanks for that info, ben_gb. I’ve only just seen your post now, as I was searching for a way to enlarge the MS IME window (the font is really too small for my aging eyes). Not sure whether you still post here, but this is certainly worthy of resurrecting to bring it to the attention of others.

Not just for learners – there are so many characters with certain pronunciations, like all the ji or yi groups, that if you are typing uncommon characters, you are now forced to scroll through hundreds instead of just scores of characters to find what you need, plus the arrow keys won’t even scroll for you – you have to use the mouse, find the arrow in the IME bar, and use that to scroll. Very frustrating. Hopefully Google will add an option to allow numerals after a syllable to by default either a) choose the character in the list, as now, or b) specify a tone so as to limit the character options.

I’m trying to use it now, and fortunately the Ctrl-shift sequence I set to toggle between English and MS Chinese IME (originally) now still works, but toggles between the three; that way for rare characters I can still use the MS version, while for colloquial text I can use the Google IME.

The font is certainly clearer and easier to read than the MS version. Thanks much for the tip! :slight_smile:

5

[quote=“Dragonbones”]Thanks for that info, ben_gb. I’ve only just seen your post now, as I was searching for a way to enlarge the MS IME window (the font is really too small for my aging eyes). Not sure whether you still post here, but this is certainly worthy of resurrecting to bring it to the attention of others.

Not just for learners – there are so many characters with certain pronunciations, like all the ji or yi groups, that if you are typing uncommon characters, you are now forced to scroll through hundreds instead of just scores of characters to find what you need, plus the arrow keys won’t even scroll for you – you have to use the mouse, find the arrow in the IME bar, and use that to scroll. Very frustrating. Hopefully Google will add an option to allow numerals after a syllable to by default either a) choose the character in the list, as now, or b) specify a tone so as to limit the character options.

I’m trying to use it now, and fortunately the Ctrl-shift sequence I set to toggle between English and MS Chinese IME (originally) now still works, but toggles between the three; that way for rare characters I can still use the MS version, while for colloquial text I can use the Google IME.

The font is certainly clearer and easier to read than the MS version. Thanks much for the tip! :slight_smile:[/quote]

Hi,

Yes…I still am here :laughing:

In fact, I gave up on the Google IME because of the lack of tones. Also, I replaced my main PC last year with with a Vista-running one, which doesn’t have the same font-size problem.

However, I’ve been also using an EEEPC running XP, so have continued to investigate a fix for the font size, which I coincidentally discovered just a few days ago.

What you need to do is update the original IME (which is called IME 2002a, I think) to the Microsoft Office IME 2003 (though you don’t actually need Office to use it or install it). See this page:
microsoft.com/downloads/deta … layLang=en
and download and install “TINTSETP.MSI: Microsoft New Phonetic IME” at the bottom.

This will update the old Chinese (Taiwan) IME to the new version.

Next, go into the options for the keyboard (probably easiest by going to the Languange tool bar after you’ve selected the Chinese (Taiwan) keyboard and click on Tools, then Properties), this window now gives you some extra options you can change, including the ability to select a large font for the Candidate List.

Hope this is of use.

Regards,
Ben